The Invitation(90)

With their new documents they will board a ferry to Tangiers. It will all happen during the screening. He won’t enter the cinema at all: in the chaos, he won’t be missed. Then Stella, halfway through, will excuse herself to go to the bathroom, and never return. Hal has studied a map of the city in the library room. The ferry port is within running distance: he’ll be waiting with their tickets.

In making these plans, it has become real. The disaster of yesterday evening feels like something that happened in a dream. The future is before them, in all its captivating uncertainty.

‘Morning.’

He turns. Earl Morgan looks terrible. The bruise is in the first, purple stage: the eye swollen, almost half-closed. In strange empathy, Hal’s knuckles smart with the memory of the blow. Hal wonders if the Contessa or Gaspari have seen him yet. Their leading man looks like he has been in a bar brawl – which isn’t altogether so far from the truth.

‘Good morning.’

‘Look, old man,’ Morgan says, ‘I came to say I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry?’ Hal wonders if the actor was so drunk that he has forgotten how it all played out.

Morgan indicates the other seat. ‘All right if I sit there?’

‘Of course.’

He collapses into it. ‘Here’s how it is. I’m a mess, I know it.’ Hal can’t think of any way to refute it without sounding disingenuous, and remains silent. ‘I think I got lost somewhere along the way.’

When Hal doesn’t answer, he says, ‘Can I tell you a story?’ And then, showing a surprising level of awareness, ‘It can’t go in that piece you’re writing, of course.’

Hal almost laughs. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘It won’t go in.’

‘The problem,’ Morgan says, ‘is that I’m not who people think I am.’

‘Are any of us?’

‘You are. You’ve got it together, I can tell.’

‘I’m flattered,’ Hal says, ‘but it’s not true. And besides, you’re an actor. Surely it comes with the territory, pretending to be someone else?’

Morgan covers his face with his hand, and then drags it down until his features are distorted in a grotesque mask. ‘But that’s the thing,’ he says. ‘In the movies, I’m the hero. I’m running around saving the good folk, killing baddies, winning the broad.’

‘Like in POW.’ Hal remembers it well. He and Suze had gone to watch it at the Lumiere. If only it had all been like that, he had thought at the time: light and dark, good and evil. Enemies who were never vulnerable, or afraid, or simply like men also caught up in a catastrophe not of their own choosing. The enemies in the film had made no secret of their desire to kill innocents, to enact evil. They had exploded in conflagrations, fallen riddled with bullets, snarling until the end. And around him in the picture house, the audience had roared their approval: many of them schoolboys still in short trousers. In the midst of all of it had been Morgan: the affable, handsome, all-American hero. Morgan without, yet, the yellowish cast to the whites of his eyes.

Morgan groans. ‘That’s the worst of all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘In real life, I’m a goddamned coward. All of that war hero stuff in the movie – it’s a joke.’

‘Ah,’ Hal says. ‘I was in the war. I don’t think anyone was as heroic as they make out in the movies. You aren’t alone.’

‘But I wimped out.’

Desertion, Hal thinks. Still a word never spoken aloud. He didn’t come across it much – mainly because of the practical difficulties of escaping a ship at sea. But there were tales of men never returning to base after leave: and of the retribution that could follow.

‘I got out of the draft, on a medical.’

‘Oh,’ Hal says. ‘Well, you can’t blame yourself for that.’

‘A false medical.’

‘How?’

‘The studio head. He got some quack to sign whatever he told him on the form, so long as it kept me out of service. Told me that what he paid the guy would put one of his kids through college. Blood pressure problems, that was what went on the form. Though I’d always been healthy as an ox. Sure I’ve got those problems now – probably a whole heap of other ones besides.

‘But the studio head, he told me that I could do more good for my country by staying home and making movies. Morale. I knew it was bull. But it worked for me: I didn’t want to go fight in Europe, in some other people’s war, maybe get killed. So I agreed.’

‘You know,’ Hal says, carefully, ‘there are many men who, if they’d been given that chance, would have taken it.’

‘My little brother, though,’ Morgan says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He didn’t have a studio head, or a paid-up doc. He worked our pa’s old farm – would never take anything I offered him. He was shipped off to the Philippines.’

‘He was … killed?’

Morgan shakes his head. ‘Had his legs destroyed. He’s a cripple now.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘You know what my ma said, when I went to visit?’

‘What?’

‘“It should have been you.” She come up to me, and she said, quiet and calm, “It should have been you. Never set foot in this house again.”’